


Forcing All These Hollow Hearts to Feel Again

by paperstorm



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bottom Steve Rogers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fix-It, Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, Like arguably too much, Lots and lots of love and feelings, M/M, Not anything close to the fic the author set out to write, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Romance, Self-cest, Threesome - M/M/M, Time Travel, Wakanda (Marvel), White Wolf Bucky Barnes, World War II, and yet here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:34:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24738535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: While returning the Infinity Stones, Steve deviates from his mission for just two things, both to ease the suffering of another and lessen the burden on his own heart. The first, is to visit Peggy Carter, to reassure her that he's alive and happy in the future. The second, is to visit himself.Another Stucky-flavored Endgame fix-it because I am helpless to them.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 70
Kudos: 324





	Forcing All These Hollow Hearts to Feel Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is nothing even remotely close to the fic I meant to write, when I started this. It was supposed to be a smutty pwp, instead it grew all kinds of feelings and a bit of plot and ended up with not very much smut at all. Sometimes flows just have to be go'd with!
> 
> Title is from the song Without Fear by Dermot Kennedy.

It takes him three weeks, four days, and 13 hours to return all the stones to their rightful, timeline-reattaching places. Some are more difficult than others. Fighting the urge to keep things in the past from happening, even though Steve knows it won’t change the future, is the most difficult. There are events he wants to alter, people he wants to save, friends in the present he wants to spare from tragedies that will tear them to shreds inside in ways that never fully heal. But he can’t.  
  
He grows a beard as camouflage, and disguises himself when necessary, and battles fiercely with the disembodied spirit of the Red Skull, and escapes a few sticky situations with cuts and bruises but still mostly in tact like he has for his entire life. He’s not a stranger to violence, and struggle, and war. He wishes he were. Maybe now, once this is all over and everything has been set right, he can become one. He hopes it’s not selfish to figure he deserves to rest, at least for a short while.  
  
There are two things, two instances, where he can’t just leave well enough alone, because they aren’t well enough. There are people hurting, wounded, in ways that they don’t deserve to be. It’s definitely selfish, that he breaks the rules only twice and both times it’s to fix his own problems. Maybe he doesn’t care about that either, maybe after a lifetime of putting himself last on every single list he’s earned the right to be selfish for once.  
  
He visits Peggy, after the last of the stones has been returned. He finds her in a D.C. suburb, in a yellow bungalow with a green Volvo wagon in the driveway and a tidy garden out front. There are cheery looking garden gnomes, and two flags displayed at angles over the detached garage; one American and one British. It’s the picture of normalcy. It’s exactly as she deserved, but Steve’s surprised she wanted it. He never figured her for the type. He tries to clean himself up, a little, as he watches from across the street as a man – her husband, Steve assumes – leaves for work. After he’s turned the corner at the end of the street, Steve makes his way across it and knocks.  
  
Peggy is smiling as she opens the door, and it falls dramatically off her face the moment she sees him. He looks so different, he knows. Older, hairier, exhausted, likely with ghosts behind his eyes that he doesn’t notice anymore when he looks in the mirror but must be as obvious as sirens to her, compared to the last time she saw him.  
  
“No,” she whispers, a hand coming up to cover her perfectly rouged lips. A wedding band with a diamond sparkles on her finger. “It’s not possible, I’m dreaming.”  
  
“Hey, Pegs,” he says. His voice is scratchy. It’s been several days since he’s spoken.  
  
“ _How_?” she demands.  
  
“Can I come in?”  
  
Eyes still wide as saucers, she nods. It isn’t until Steve’s crossed the threshold into her home and walked far enough into it to turn back and look at her, that he notices. She looks largely the same, only a few years older, chestnut hair still curled and styled meticulously, makeup still perfect, clothing still pressed and neat, except for one thing. She’s pregnant, her lavender sweater stretching over a protruding stomach.  
  
“Oh,” Steve says, when he notices. It brings unexpected tears to his eyes. “Oh, Peggy. Congratulations.”  
  
“You’re alive,” she says, ignoring him. She stares at him like he’s a ghost, and Steve supposes he is.  
  
“Yeah. I just … wanted you to know that.”  
  
“How are you alive?”  
  
Swallowing thickly, Steve holds out his hand. His wild mind is calmed when she takes it. She could always do that to him. He always felt safer when she was nearby, even in his darkest moments during the war, after he lost Bucky. “It’s a really, really long story. I can tell it to you, if you want.”  
  
“You’re not …” she steps closer to him, and brings her other hand up, fingertips dragging lightly through his beard. “You’re so different.”  
  
“I’m not from … now,” he explains, unsure of exactly how to describe it. “I’m from the year 2023.”  
  
“Right.” She huffs a humorless laugh and shakes her head, as if she should have guessed that somehow. Steve suspects underneath her relatively calm reaction is a symphony of panic and confusion and anger waiting to explode as soon as he gets his unwelcome presence off her property. “Of course you are.”  
  
“I can explain that, too. But it’s not really important, I just … I wanted you to know that I’m okay, in the future.”  
  
She nods slowly. She doesn’t understand, Steve can tell, and probably wouldn’t even if he did take the time to regale her with every messy detail.  
  
“I’m happy you’re happy,” he tells her, squeezing her hand. “And I know you, in the future. Decades from now, we’ll meet again. You do amazing things, Peggy.”  
  
She presses her crimson lips together for a moment and then blinks up at him, tears shining in her dark eyes. “Are you?” she asks. “Happy?”  
  
“That’s … complicated.”  
  
“You’re not answering any of my questions, Steve from the future,” she accuses, and Steve laughs.  
  
“I know, sorry. Like I said, I can, if you really want me to. It’s just …”  
  
“A long story.”  
  
“A lot of long stories,” Steve agrees. “Bucky’s alive, too. I got him back.”  
  
“Oh.” A confused, but genuine smile takes over her pretty face. “That’s wonderful.”  
  
Steve squeezes her hand again. “It is.”  
  
He stays for the weekend. Sleeps on their sofa, meets Peggy’s husband Daniel and their dog Rufus. Tells Peggy all those long, complicated stories. Participates in a conversation about baby names. Listens to music, laughs with them on their patio under the stars. When he leaves, he hugs them both, but holds onto Peggy the longest, her pregnant belly pressed against his abdomen and inhaling deeply the scent of her hair so he won’t forget it again any time soon.  
  
“You tell Sergeant Barnes he still owes me a Coke,” she says to him, when he finally lets her go. Wiping her eyes, she explains, “he lost a bet to me, one night when you were unconscious in the infirmary and he was refusing to leave your side. The bastard went and died before he could pay up.”  
  
Steve laughs, and hugs her once more. “I will.”  
  
Walking away from them is harder than he’d anticipated, but when he glances back over his shoulder, they’re on their front porch, Daniel’s arm around Peggy’s waist and waving, and he smiles to himself. He doesn’t regret anything.  
  
The second thing is going to be worse, anyway.  
  
The flood of memories that washes over him, as he steps covertly into the camp under the cover of darkness, is visceral and painful like a stab wound. It starts in his gut and radiates out to all his extremities, throbbing under his skin. The smells, the sounds of the night, the plain canvas tents and the armoured vehicles in rows and the squish of mud under his feet. It’s raining. It always seemed to be raining on the worst days, Steve remembers, as if the weather was personally attuned to his suffering. There are other things he wishes he could do, now that he’s here. Men he wants to warn about the bullets that will take them, others he wants to apologize to for abandoning them. He knows he can’t. He can’t fix everything that went wrong. It wouldn’t make a spot of difference even if he could.  
  
He finds himself, just where he knew he’d be. Alone, in his own tent, closer to the edge of the encampment than most of the other tents, set back a ways from the rest of them. He inhales the smell of rain, and turns his face up to the sky, letting the water wet his skin so he can wipe any mud splatters from it before he goes inside.  
  
His past self is sitting, at a table with his shoulders slumped, staring motionless into the oil lamp that sits in the center of it. There is a bottle of something strong and amber next to him, half empty, and a glass next to his left hand. Steve remembers drinking and drinking and drinking, long after he’d discovered it had absolutely no effect. He’d been determined to find out if there was a ceiling on that. Maybe one bottle wouldn’t get him drunk enough to forget the way Bucky had screamed as he fell, but maybe two would. Maybe four. Maybe 50.  
  
“I don’t wanna talk anymore, Peggy,” past Steve says, in an exhausted voice. He doesn’t turn around.  
  
Steve aches for him. He can recall every bit of this moment as if it happened just yesterday, and standing here, with the relentless pelting of rain loud on the canvas above their heads, watching it play out like a movie, sends him straight back to it. To the devastation, to the searing burn of grief and guilt. To sitting here realizing, like a million tiny knives pressing into every inch of him, that he’d never be held again the way Bucky used to hold him. That he’d never be kissed and touched _cherished_ the same way. That even if he met someone else and grew old with them, it wouldn’t be the same. That no one would ever love him the way Bucky did, and Bucky was gone forever.  
  
Steve remembers feeling so alone, so hopeless in that moment, that it took every ounce of strength he had to keep from ending it all with his lips wrapped around the barrel of a gun. And it’s hardly like he retained that strength for very long, anyway. He’s spent years trying to convince himself that flying that aircraft into the ocean was a sacrifice for the greater good, was inescapable, was something he did because there was no other option. Standing here now, looking at his former self even from behind, he understands more clearly than he ever has, that it wasn’t. There were other options. He could have set the plane on the right course, given Peggy his coordinates, and jumped. He still might not have survived, but he could have _tried_ to. He didn’t want to. There was nothing for him to live for.  
  
“It’s not Peggy,” he says, quietly. “Please don’t scream.”  
  
Past Steve inhales sharply and leaps out of his chair, hand flying to the holster at his hip.  
  
Steve barely has time to hold his hands up in surrender before there’s a gun in his face. “ _Relax_ , it’s okay, I’m not here to hurt you.”  
  
“What are …” past Steve begins, but then Steve watches as realization takes over his face. His eyes are red and watery, the skin around them swollen from hours crying, but they widen dramatically and his mouth falls open.  
  
Even in grief, Steve is struck by how young he looks. He doesn’t remember feeling young, then. He remembers feeling so damn old, and tired, and worn down. He remembers the toll taken, by struggling to keep food on the table back in Brooklyn, by getting his ass handed to him by every tough in the city, by loving Bucky so fiercely but having to hide it, and at this point, by the horrors of war. He remembers feeling a million years old, but now, standing face to face with his 28 year old self, Steve realizes how young he really was. Too young, he thinks, to have the weight of the entire world on his shoulders the way he did. Too young to have seen so much blood. Too young to have lost the love of his life.  
  
“What the fuck,” past Steve breathes, lips parted, color draining from his face.  
  
“I’m sorry, I know this is … I know it must seem crazy.”  
  
“Who are you?” He surges forward, and the butt of the gun is pressed to Steve’s forehead.  
  
He keeps his hands raised, keeps his voice calm. Likely, he could take his past self down, if he needed to. He’s much more practiced in hand-to-hand combat now than he was then, and he’s not the one caught off guard. He hopes it won’t need to come to that.  
  
“You know,” he answers.  
  
Past Steve stares at him with wild eyes. “This isn’t possible.”  
  
“Everything that’s happened to you in the last few years? Getting the serum, fighting a guy who could take his own face off? And time travel still seems impossible?”  
  
It’s much creepier than staring into a mirror, as Steve watches a series of emotions play out on his own face. He sees the confusion, and the fear, watches his former self’s eyes as they dart down his body, taking in Steve’s beard and his different uniform.  
  
“Tell me something – ”  
  
“That only we would know?” Steve finishes, and he’s nodded at.  
  
It’s going to sting, and he regrets it already, but it’s the only thing that will really work, and he doesn’t have time to waste. He isn’t safe, here, to give long explanations and spend the weekend like he did at Peggy’s. This one is not about talking and laughing and healing. This one has to be tear-the-bandaid-off quick.  
  
“You’re in love with Bucky,” he says, hating the way past Steve flinches at the mention of the name. “You have been since you were a little kid. _We_ have been.”  
  
The gun doesn’t move an inch from where it’s still pressing into his skull, but past Steve’s hands shake and fresh tears spill down his splotchy cheeks.  
  
“When we were a teenager, we kept a shoe box under our bed of nude sketches we’d done of him, after we accidentally saw him undressed once. There were dozens of them. Bucky never knew. We set fire to them in the alley behind our apartment, when we were 20 and we saw Bucky kissing Sally O’Brien outside the picture theater.”  
  
“How d’you …”  
  
“Because I’m _you_ ,” Steve says insistently. “I know, I know this is nuts, and I don’t really have time to explain, I’m sorry. You just have to trust me.”  
  
The gun is lowered, and tears continue to stream down past Steve’s smooth-shaven face. Steve remembers, vividly, how much he’d cried, in the days after Bucky fell. How the tears just seem incapable of stopping, how he’d struggle to pull himself together and it would last three minutes before he fell apart again, how he’d cried until he was weak and dehydrated and thought surely his body must be out of moisture, and then he’d cry some more.  
  
“Why are you here?” past Steve whispers.  
  
“Because Bucky’s alive,” Steve says. Bandaid ripped off. What’s underneath is not a healed-over scab, it’s a fresh, actively bleeding wound, and Steve hates causing more pain. He knows the man – the _kid_ , really – standing before him can’t take much more.  
  
Swollen blue eyes widen, and then narrow, and then close. The gun falls to the ground, slipping out of past Steve’s loosened grip and hitting the dirt with a soft thud. Steve flinches, half expecting it to fire from the impact, but it doesn’t.  
  
“This is a dream,” he says, exhaling deeply. Hands come up to scrub over his face. He walks, defeated, toward his cot, and sits heavily down on it, elbows resting on his knees and head hanging forward. “A nightmare. You’re not real. Maybe I can actually get drunk.”  
  
“It’s not,” Steve says. He clenches his jaw to fight the burning behind his eyes. He tackled seeing Peggy first because he knew this one would be worse, but he was not prepared for how much it would hurt. “I wish it was.”  
  
“What else?” His hand waves in front of him, inviting Steve to continue. “Is he gonna just waltz back in here, completely fine? Ask me to marry him? Do I become president one day?”  
  
Steve closes his own eyes for a moment. When he opens them, his past self has buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders are trembling. Steve goes to him, sitting next to him on the cot and roughly grabbing his right hand.  
  
“Do you feel this?” he asks, digging his thumb as hard as he can into is past self’s palm.  
  
“Ow,” past Steve hisses. “Stop!”  
  
“Do you feel it?” Steve repeats, louder, although still conscious of not attracting attention from those around them, even though the percussion of the rain on canvas tents provides a nice cover for whatever noise might come from theirs.  
  
“Yeah, I feel it, get off!” past Steve cries, yanking his hand away and rubbing it, glaring reproachfully.  
  
“I’m not a dream, and you’re not drunk. I’m you from the future, and I know that sounds insane but it’s the truth and I don’t have a lot of time,” Steve tells him. “I need you to listen to me. Bucky is alive. He survived the fall and Hydra got him. They’ve got him right now.”  
  
“Where?” past Steve asks. He still doesn’t believe it, he’s still eyeing Steve like he’s about to shapeshift at any second, back into whatever being would play such a cruel trick on a person who’s just lost everything.  
  
“I don’t know,” Steve admits. “When I was – you – future me didn’t come here and tell me this. I didn’t find out he was alive until decades from now. He suffers, listen, the things they do to him. You have to stop it from happening. I didn’t, I didn’t know. But he suffers for almost 70 years because I didn’t know. So you have to find him. You have to stop it.”  
  
“How?” More tears fall, more liquid misery dripping from his eyes, and Steve wants to pull him into a hug, to comfort himself, to promise him everything will be alright. It would be a lie, if he did. Steve can’t promise any such thing.  
  
“I don’t know that either. If I had any idea where they were keeping him, I’d go there myself right now, but I don’t, and I can’t stay here much longer.”  
  
Steve stands, the hairs on the back of his neck raising when he thinks he hears movement outside. He tiptoes toward the entrance to the tent and listens with baited breath, but the sound doesn’t return. Must have been the wind, or twigs in the distance cracking under the footsteps of an animal. When he looks back, his past self is even more deflated than he was before, sobbing audibly with a hand pressed over his mouth to muffle the sound.  
  
Steve swallows and swears under his breath, and goes back to him. He kneels in front of him, taking his own hands and tugging gently. “Hey. I know, alright? I remember being right here, I remember feeling everything you’re feeling right now. But you have the chance to change how this all goes down. You can get him back. And in the future? Hey, look at me.”  
  
Past Steve does, anguish spelled out all over his face and so many tears clogging up his eyes that Steve can barely even see the blue in them.  
  
“In the future,” Steve tells him, “we’re together. It’s not like it is, now. We don’t have to hide anymore. We don’t have to keep it all under lock and key, he doesn’t have to take girls dancing every weekend to keep up the charade, you don’t have to worry every time that he might fall in love with one of them instead and leave you alone. All that’s in the past. We just get to love him.”  
  
“We do?” past Steve whimpers.  
  
Steve nods. “I promise.”  
  
He hears the noise from outside again. It’s probably just the patrol. He still can’t take that risk.  
  
“I have to go. Find him, alright? Use Peggy, go tell her everything I just told you. She’ll believe you, she’ll help. Use Howard, too, if you can convince him. He’s got more resources than the Army.”  
  
“Wait,” past Steve begs, but Steve can’t wait.  
  
The sun is bright, when he materializes back onto the platform on the cloudless afternoon of Tony’s funeral. In front of him, where they had been just (for them) seconds ago, Bruce and Sam stare at him. Bruce’s massive arms shoot up into the air above his head.  
  
“Time travel part two!” he shouts triumphantly, and then cringes immediately as he remembers where they are and lowers his voice. With a childlike grin on his green face, he softly cheers, “time travel part two!”  
  
“Thank God,” Sam mutters, rubbing his hands over his head and around to clasp at the back of his neck.  
  
Yards away, towards the lake, Steve’s eyes find Bucky. He’s facing half the other way, as if he’d been walking away when Steve reappeared. His long hair shines in the sunlight, half of it pulled back into a messy bun. He looks, as he had before Steve left, almost unlike himself in black skinny jeans and a bomber jacket. The outfit is entirely too modern, to look right on him, even though it looks good regardless. They shouldn’t have ended up here, Steve thinks. They should have both survived the war. They should have lived in a kinder time, so they could have bought the house next door to Peggy’s and Daniel’s. They should have had normal jobs, and grown old with their friends. Or, they should have both stayed dead. A love story wiped out before it ever emerged from the shadows, a tragedy lost to history among the millions of other unhappy endings that result from war.  
  
Against odds so crazy he thinks not even Tony could have calculated them, if he were still with them, they are here. And Bucky is looking at him, from yards away, with his lips parted and his ocean-colored eyes widened in surprise. _Surprise_. He wasn’t expecting Steve to come back.  
  
Steve hops down off the platform and runs to him. Darts headlong in the direction he’s always, always been running – toward Bucky. He throws himself into Bucky’s arms, uncaring that they’re not alone, that they’re being watched, that they’ve never really been open about this in this way, even in Wakanda for the two years before everything went to hell.  
  
Bucky grunts at the impact as Steve crashes into him, but his arms are flung around Steve’s neck and he hugs back just as tight, just as desperate. “I thought …” he whispers.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” Steve whispers back, burying his face in Bucky’s hair. “I didn’t mean to scare you, I – Buck, I was always going to come back. Always.”  
  
“You could have been happy,” Bucky says, the words breathed against Steve’s cheek. “I don’t … I have nothing to offer you.”  
  
“What the hell d’you think I’m looking for from you, a business plan?” Steve pulls back enough to see his face, to cup his cheek and rub tears away from under his eyes. “It’s not a contract negotiation, I’m in love you. Have been since before I can even remember.”  
  
Bucky’s lower lip trembles, and Steve kisses it. They’ve never kissed in front of anyone before, never. Not even once. Behind them, Bruce whoops loudly, and then Sam gripes at him for again forgetting they’re at a memorial service. But then Sam is on them, wrapping an arm around each of them from the side, and then Bruce is too, scooping all three of them up into a bone crushing hug in his big arms as if they’re as light as a pack of kittens.  
  
When he sets them back down, Steve kisses Bucky again, in broad daylight, less than a foot away from Sam’s goofy grinning face.  
  
Bucky’s hut in Wakanda looks exactly the same, down to the detail, as the last time Steve saw it. The bed is still unmade. The cups they’d been drinking water from are still sitting at the table. He realizes he was never back here, after the snap. And a few days ago, Bucky had rematerialized exactly where he’d been standing when it happened, and then joined Steve on the battlefield with everyone else. It’s like pictures he’s seen of ghost towns, or Pompeii after the eruption. A life put on pause, left to linger as if nothing had changed, as if they’d just gone out for a run one afternoon and never returned. It’s haunting.  
  
It’s a week, before everything truly catches up with Steve. At first he’s too happy to have Bucky back to really feel any of the five years he’d spent alone, to notice the damage they did. But they did, and it finds him eventually. The weeks after that are rough ones. As much as he fights it, tries to keep it at bay, Steve feels all of it. The loss of Tony, of _Natasha_ , his closest friend through all of this. She was maybe the truest friend he’s ever had, ever, and she’s gone, and he can’t bring her back. No one can. The loss of himself, of the person he was before the snap, of the person he was before the _war_. He’s lost so many pieces of himself he can scarcely remember that twenty-something kid who loved Bucky and hated bullies.  
  
Bucky had said, as they embraced on the lawn outside Tony’s cabin, _I have nothing to offer you_. Steve nearly chokes on the heartache as he realizes how little _he_ has to offer _Bucky_. Steve doesn’t even have a home. Bucky’s hut was his sanctuary during his years on the run, but it never belonged to him. There is an apartment in Brooklyn, where Steve lived during the lost years, but he never went back there, either, after they defeated Thanos. He doesn’t know what happened to it. Probably the landlord gave up trying to contact him and threw all of his things in the dumpster out back and rented it to someone else. He wonders if the new tenant knows it used to be occupied by Captain America. He wonders if they would care, if the world has outgrown its need for Captain America. If he was only ever an empty symbol anyway, and he’s far outstayed his welcome.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Bucky whispers to him, on a bad night, when Steve is clinging to him in his bed, terrified that if he lets go, Bucky will disappear.  
  
“Not your fault, Buck.”  
  
“I’m not sorry because it’s my fault. I’m sorry because I love you and you’re hurting.”  
  
“Five years. I missed you so much,” Steve rasps. At the moment, it feels like it was 20. He remembers the passing of every excruciating minute.  
  
“I can’t imagine.” Bucky strokes his hair, and holds him tight. He’s solid and warm and _real_ against Steve. He smells like he always has, that comforting combination of clean sweat and warm skin. He _won’t_ disappear if Steve lets go, Steve knows that. He just can’t convince his heart of it, sometimes.  
  
“I did go to see Peggy,” Steve confesses. He doesn’t know why it feels like a confession. He should have told Bucky that weeks ago, and the fact that he didn’t is the only thing that makes it a shameful secret.  
  
“I figured you would.” Another kiss to his forehead. Bucky’s fingers play lightly along Steve’s face, through his beard. Steve leans back a bit to look up at him. There are tears in Bucky’s eyes, but he’s smiling. He’s not angry, or betrayed. “How was she?”  
  
“Married,” Steve says. “Pregnant.”  
  
“Were you surprised?”  
  
“No.” Steve shakes his head. “No, I … I knew she got married. I knew her, when she was old. I knew she had a family.”  
  
“Were you disappointed?”  
  
Steve shakes his head again, more insistently this time. “I wanted her to be happy. My life wasn’t meant to be with her. I’ve been yours since the day we met.”  
  
A slow exhale, and a slower kiss pressed to his lips. “And I’ve been yours,” Bucky murmurs. “But you’re allowed to wish things had been different.”  
  
“I wish …” Steve pushes himself up to one elbow, so he can look down into Bucky’s handsome face. He cups his cheek, placing a soft kiss to his lips and then pressing their foreheads together so they can share the air from the words he whispers. “I wish we were born a century later, so we never had to hide. I wish I’d been able to catch your hand, so you never fell. I wish there had never been a war in the first place. I wish I’d known you were still alive, so I could’ve found you before they hurt you as much as they did. I wish we’d stopped Thanos the first time around. I wish a lot of things. So many things it feels like sometimes I can’t breathe. But I’ve never, ever regretted you. I’ve never wished I didn’t love you.”  
  
“Neither have I.” Bucky’s arms wrap around his back, and keep him close.  
  
“I went to see me, too,” Steve continues. “In 1945, a few days after you fell.”  
  
Bucky blows out a slow, noisy breath. “That must’ve been …”  
  
“Yeah. But I had to tell him. Me. That you were alive. I know it doesn’t change anything for you, now. Everything that happened still happened. I just couldn’t let him fly that plane into the ocean thinking you’re dead. I couldn’t let another version of me leave you to be tortured for 70 years.”  
  
“It wasn’t your fault.”  
  
“I know. I know it wasn’t. I didn’t know. But now he does. He can fix it.”  
  
“Did he believe you?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Steve admits.  
  
The thought settles in the back of his mind. For a week, it stays there, burrowed into some soft place at the base of his skull, ever present but not making much noise about it. But it lingers, and it gets louder as time passes. As Steve sits on the bank of the river, watching Bucky waist deep in the clear water with a bar of soap in his hand, he wonders. He replays the scene in his mind, and he worries, because what if he didn’t? What if his past self goes to sleep and wakes up the next morning and decides it _was_ all a terrible dream? It would have all been for nothing. Steve would have left even further emotional scars on himself, and Bucky is still being tortured as he sits here, being maimed, being brainwashed. As Steve relaxes in the sun with his Bucky safe and content in the water, Bucky from 78 years ago might be strapped down, trying to fight back, screaming as they do things to him that Steve can’t imagine in his darkest nightmares.  
  
There aren’t any Pym Particles left. He used up the last one to get back to the platform. He tries to put the thought out of his mind, because even if past Steve didn’t believe him, there’s nothing present Steve can do about it. But he’s never, for as long as he’s been alive, been any good at that.  
  
“You’ve been quiet,” Bucky says to him. He joins Steve where he’s sitting on the grass, back leaned against a tree near Bucky’s hut. It’s dusk, and the fires are being lit in the village. Steve watches people milling about, hears music in the near distance. It’s so peaceful, here. He’s not sure he ever deserved to end up in a place like this.  
  
“What if you’re right?” Steve worries.  
  
“I’m always right.” Bucky grins at him, leaning back against the broad trunk of the tree and knocking the side of his knee into Steve’s. “But, about what, specifically?”  
  
“Me in the past. What if he didn’t believe me? About you?”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky says, voice flipping from teasing to tired in half a heartbeat. Steve recognizes his name said in that tone so well, that tone that says _don’t even go there_.  
  
“Would you believe it?” Steve reasons. “Back then, before we knew about aliens and magic and everything. If a guy who looked like you but with a beard showed up in your tent and told you he was you from the future, would you have believed a single word he said? Or would you have just chalked it up to, I don’t know, dysentery?”  
  
“You never had dysentery.”  
  
“You know what I mean.”  
  
Bucky exhales. A woman they both recognize walks past them with a woven basket balanced on her hip, and they both wave at her. When she’s out of ear shot, Bucky says, “it’s hard to say. It’s hard to imagine what I would have thought, in a time before I knew something, because I know it now.”  
  
“If he didn’t …”  
  
“Then nothing changes.” Bucky reaches for his hand. He threads their fingers together, and brings them up to his face so he can kiss Steve’s knuckles. “There’s nothing you can do. We’ll still end up here.”  
  
“What if there was something? What if we could go back, together? If he saw you … maybe it would convince him it was real.”  
  
“But we can’t,” Bucky points out.  
  
“We could ask Shuri. I haven’t yet seen a single thing she can’t do, if she decides on it. And Bruce knows how it all works, with the Particles. Between the two of them …”  
  
“Don’t you think they have more important things to be worrying about right now?” Bucky kisses his hand again, and with his other, he reaches over to brush wayward strands of hair from Steve’s forehead. “Putting the world back together and everything?”  
  
He isn’t wrong. Steve’s been helping, too, they both have. Assisting with coordinating humanitarian aid, Steve lending whatever cache Captain America still has to international diplomatic efforts. He’s shaken more hands in the last month than in the entirety of his life. They always come back here, at the end of the day, to their quiet little life among the Border Tribe. But they’re helping. And Shuri and Bruce have been instrumental; have done far more good than Steve has. Bucky’s right, it wouldn’t be fair, to ask this of them while they have so many other things on their plate, things far more important than this.  
  
“In a month or two, then. Or whenever everything is mostly back to … if not normal, as close as it can be.”  
  
Bucky regards him, with softness glittering in his eyes. He leans forward to kiss Steve’s cheek, and then the other, and then the bridge of his nose. “If they figured out how to send us back, then yes, I would go with you. If it’s important to you. But you deserve to pick the world up off that shoulder and set it down, Atlas. Every single wrong doesn’t have to be yours to right. You deserve to rest.”  
  
“I’m trying,” Steve says.  
  
“I know, babydoll,” Bucky answers gently.  
  
Steve smiles, allows it to fill him up. “Been a long time since you called me that.”  
  
“I kinda thought you never liked it.”  
  
“I loved it. I was so stubborn, too stubborn and too worried about what anyone else would think, to let you love me the way you always wanted to. To let myself be …”  
  
“You gonna let it happen now?”  
  
Steve nods. “Yeah.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
He gets to his feet and pulls Steve with him, leads him back to their hut, settles him down on the sleep mat and surrounds him in warmth and love. Bucky kisses him like he’ll die if he stops, touches him with hands that are insistent but gentle, passionate but reverent. His mouth is heavenly on Steve as his fingers prod at Steve’s entrance and open him like flower buds in the spring so Bucky can slide easily inside, filling Steve up in ways beyond just the physical. Steve floats in it, soaks it up like a sponge, and for a while, the thought stops nagging him.  
  
Until it doesn’t. He does wait, like Bucky had suggested. It’s a lot longer than a month. It’s several, before things start feeling like the ground underneath them all is steady again. Before community rebuilding efforts are firmly in place all across the globe, before governments are restructured, before Steve sees Bruce or Shuri or really anyone without messy hair and purple-rimmed eyes and stress lines on their faces. But it happens. A few days without major incident, and then a week, and then two. People seem less in need of their help, world leaders reorganize, social programs reinstate. It’s a long haul, but Steve knows better than anyone that there is always light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s so far off that at first you can’t make it out.  
  
“You wanted to speak to me?” Shuri asks, after Steve hugs her hello in her lab on an overcast Tuesday morning.  
  
“How are you?” Steve asks.  
  
“Very well, thank you. And you?”  
  
“Better all the time.” It’s the truth, even though it feels almost precarious to admit. Steve still has bad days. Bucky has them more often. But neither as frequently as they used to. Hard-earned progress, Steve has come to understand, is more satisfying than easy fixes.  
  
“I’m happy to hear it.” She wipes sweat from her brow. Across the room, Steve recognizes the sound of laughter.  
  
“Sam’s here?” he asks, perking up and trying to catch sight of him through the maze of machinery.  
  
“Hamba uyo bepha inja!” Shuri cries, her hands slapping down to her sides.  
  
“Did you just call me a dog?” Steve asks, not catching every word.  
  
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Shuri says, rolling her eyes and looking put out.  
  
“A surprise for who?”  
  
“For you.”  
  
Steve frowns. “Why?”  
  
She stares at him. “Your birthday is tomorrow.”  
  
“It … oh. Fuck, it is.” Steve laughs; he’s lost the ability, it would seem, to keep track of the date. He hadn’t even remembered it was already July.  
  
She mutters something else, that he assumes is more colorful language, and grabs his arm, dragging him off into a more secluded corner of the lab. “ _Don’t you dare_ tell him you found out. Any of them. Act surprised tomorrow or I’ll personally put scorpions in your bed.”  
  
“Any of them?”  
  
“You didn’t really think everyone wouldn’t come for your birthday.”  
  
Steve doesn’t press for further information because he doubts she’d give it, but in his head, a list forms of people he hopes she’s referring to. He only saw Sam last week, he’s here a lot, but it’s been nearly a month since he’s seen Wanda or Clint.  
  
“Now, what did you want?” she asks. “I do have work to do.”  
  
“Right. I, um. If I needed one last jump, into the quantum realm, into the past. Do you … think …?”  
  
Her dark eyes narrow.  
  
“It doesn’t need to be immediately,” he clarifies, squirming under her stare. “Just, hypothetically. Could you?”  
  
“Tell me why.”  
  
“It’s – complicated.”  
  
She tilts her head to one side and impatiently says, “I’m not going to do if it you don’t tell me why.”  
  
He explains, fully at the mercy of her ultimatum because he doesn’t have the ability to do this without her help, and when he’s done, instead of arguing or lecturing him on the dangers of altering the past, she hugs him.  
  
“What was that for?”  
  
“You are a good man, Captain Rogers. Bucky deserves someone who loves him as much as you do. I will see what I can do. I make no promises, but I will contact Dr. Banner and we will see.”  
  
Relief washes over Steve, because he knows she’ll figure it out. He has no doubt. “Thank you.”  
  
“Consider it your birthday present.”  
  
Two weeks and four days later, Steve stands next to Bucky, in custom suits Shuri built for them, facing the platform they’d transported here from Tony’s cabin after Steve’s last jump.  
  
“If they’d had you around, they would’ve defeated Thanos a week after the snap,” Bucky tells her, and she raises an eyebrow primly.  
  
“Correct.”  
  
She sets the device to send them back to the same night Steve visited himself, only a while later to make sure they don’t overlap with Steve being there the first time. Bucky looks nervous, but he takes Steve’s hand and climbs up with them, and Shuri salutes them teasingly as she flips the switch and sends them hurtling into time.  
  
It’s still raining. The bright white of Shuri’s sun-kissed lab is replaced instantly by dull and dreary, mud and rain and the always lingering smell of gunpowder.  
  
Next to him, Bucky looks around, and mumbles, “God. I do not miss being here.”  
  
“He’s in there,” Steve says, pointing to the tent at the edge of the enclosure. It’s been so long, since the last time he was here, in their timeline. In this one, it’s been about 45 minutes.  
  
“How awful is this going to be?”  
  
“He’s …” Steve stares at the beige tent a short ways away from them, remembering what’s waiting for them in there. Remembering the gun and the half-empty bottle of rye. “He’s devastated. I don’t think I did anything but cry for about five straight days, after I lost you. I’m sorry, I … I’m so stupid, I should’ve thought about how hard this would be for you.”  
  
Bucky shakes his head slowly. “We’re here, now. You were right, he deserves this.”  
  
“Maybe we don’t – ”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky interrupts. He smiles at him sadly. “You just told that poor kid that I’m alive. He deserves proof. It might be years before he finds me, he deserves to know he’s not chasing a lie.”  
  
Steve nods. They walk, hand in hand through the mud, and slowly Steve pulls back the flap on the tent. His former self is on the cot, now, curled up with his arms wrapped around his knees and his face pushed into the meager pillow, his big body tucked into as tight a ball as he can manage. Steve distinctly remembers, after the serum, missing being small in moments of sadness and wishing desperately he could curl up in Bucky’s lap like he used to, safe and protected. He doesn’t remember if that’s what he was thinking about in this exact moment, but given the circumstances, wouldn’t be surprised at all.  
  
Past Steve looks up, tired eyes meeting Steve’s. “Oh,” he says softly. “You’re back.”  
  
“Hey, bud,” Steve says kindly. From behind him, Bucky inhales quietly, peering at a Steve from nearly 80 years ago, but one he knew so intimately. In this timeline, the two of them were together only days before. Steve can still recall their last night together before the train. He can still see it if he closes his eyes, hear the way Bucky moaned, feel all that young, smooth skin under his fingers.  
  
Past Steve sits up abruptly. He stares, gapes, with his mouth back open and his eyes bulging.  
  
“Hi, Stevie,” Bucky says. His voice comes out pinched, and Steve squeezes his hand. It can’t be comforting, likely nothing could in this moment, but the best he can do for either of them is just be here.  
  
Past Steve stands, knees wobbling under him and sending him back down to the cot once before he manages to get properly upright. He looks back and forth between the two visitors, eyes darting, questioning, terror and wonder and a desperation, Steve thinks, to believe what he’s seeing is real. Steve knows just how much he, back then, would have given to have Bucky walk back into their camp as if nothing had happened. It scares him, a little, to see it play out so plainly in front of his very eyes. To think of the sacrifices he would have made, the blood he would have spilt, if it meant he’d get Bucky back.  
  
“You …?” past Steve’s eyes finally decide to settle on Steve’s, blue meeting blue.  
  
“I thought you deserved some proof,” Steve says to him, “that I was telling the truth. That he didn’t die.”  
  
Past Steve’s eyes flit down to their clasped hands, and then Bucky lets Steve’s go. He takes a few tentative steps forward, as if he’s approaching a wounded animal. In a way, he is. “I’m alive,” he says. “Everything he told you before is true. Hydra got me. Brainwashed me, made me forget you. But I never forgot you. Not really. I remembered you when it mattered.”  
  
Past Steve just shakes his head. He isn’t saying _no_ , he’s just so overwhelmed he can’t think clearly. “Your hair,” he croaks.  
  
“Oh.” Bucky laughs a little and brings his hand up to rub over the long strands. “Yeah. You like it, in the future. Even though I look like a caveman. Or, at least, you tell me you like it. You could be lying.”  
  
He looks over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow at Steve. Steve smiles at him. “Not lying. I like it.”  
  
“Your hand,” past Steve says, sounding even more bothered.  
  
Far too late, Steve remembers Bucky’s metal arm. He remembers he never mentioned that, the last time he was here. Most of it is covered by the long sleeves of the suit, but Bucky’s charcoal-colored vibranium fingers glint in the light from the lamp on the table.  
  
Bucky looks down at it for a moment before he answers. Then he holds it out, and takes a few more steps closer. “You can, it’s okay, I won’t hurt you,” he says to past Steve, who reaches hesitantly for it. Flesh fingers explore over metal ones, and Bucky steps closer still. “I don’t know exactly when this happens. I don’t know if I lost the arm when I fell, or if they … I just don’t know. It might have happened already. Just so you’re prepared.”  
  
“They might be doing this to you right now,” past Steve concludes. Water spills over the red rims of his eyes. “Hurting you.”  
  
“They might be,” Bucky agrees. “Nothing you can do about that tonight.”  
  
“Bucky,” past Steve breathes, saying his name out loud for the first time.  
  
“Hi, Steve,” Bucky says again. He steps in one last time, and then past Steve trembles and tips forward and falls into Bucky’s arms, sobs loud and horrible inside the canvas walls, the sounds of them mixing with the pouring rain outside for a symphony of misery that Steve feels down to his bones, even as he’s standing away from them near the tent’s entrance.  
  
Bucky turns them, so he can look at Steve overtop of a blond head as past Steve clings to him and cries into Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky’s eyes aren’t dry either.  
  
_I’m sorry_ , Steve mouths at him.  
  
Bucky shakes his head, and then turns his face into short blond hair and holds him as he weeps. Steve can’t stand being so far away anymore. He crosses the short distance between them, dusting up the dirt from the ground below with his boots. He moves in behind Bucky, cupping Bucky’s hips in his hands, needing to be touching him even though this particular moment does not involve Steve. Not the Steve in his present state, anyway.  
  
“If I’d just held you,” past Steve gasps, despair so thick in the room Steve feels like he can’t breathe through it. He remembers those emotions, remembers them so viscerally it’s like being punched in the face. “I almost had your hand, all of this is my fault.”  
  
“ _No_ , it isn’t,” Bucky insists. “Stevie, it isn’t. It’s a war, people die in war. You didn’t do anything wrong, you tried to save me. I know how hard you tried.”  
  
“I let you go. I loved you and I let you fall.”  
  
“You didn’t,” Bucky says again, but there’s no point in going much further. They both know how much this Steve will blame himself, no matter what anybody says. That’s just who he is. That’s still who he is.  
  
Bucky strokes his back and lets him cry, and Steve stays behind him, stays pressed in close. It seems like ages before it slows, before the puncture of past Steve’s sobs begin to quiet and lessen, until he’s only sniffling wetly against Bucky’s shoulder. When he lifts his head to look up at them, his eyes are so puffy they’re nearly swollen shut, and Steve swallows thickly to keep his own heart from breaking too outwardly. He’d like to cry, too, but this moment isn’t about him.  
  
“I love you so much,” past Steve says, and then closes his eyes and drops his head, guilty. “M’sorry. I know it’s not … you. It is, but it isn’t.”  
  
“Your Bucky is out there,” Bucky promises him. “And he loves you back, more than he’s ever been able to say. He’s tried but he always cocks it up, always gets tongue tied and says the words wrong. But you mean everything to him.”  
  
“It’s alright.” Steve steadies himself with a cleansing breath, and kisses the back of Bucky’s head. He feels Bucky’s weight shift, leaning into him. “You can kiss him, Buck, if you want to. He needs it. He misses you so much it feels like his chest is about to split open.”  
  
His own voice wavers over the words, and past Steve lets out another ragged sob.  
  
“Stevie,” Bucky murmurs. Steve isn’t sure which of them he’s talking to. Maybe both. But then he tilts past Steve’s chin up with a bent finger, raising his tear-streaked face to the lamplight so they can see him.  
  
“It’s not like it’s cheating. He’s me,” Steve reasons.  
  
“I …” past Steve gasps around another shuddering sob, one so soul-deep it shakes his entire body.  
  
“I’m here,” Bucky says, and he’s definitely talking to the Steve before him, now, not the one behind him. “Right here.”  
  
Past Steve whimpers, and Bucky tips forward and swallows the sound from his mouth. Their lips slide together, slow and wet with tears. It evolves as Steve watches, the flash of a tongue emerges, past Steve gripping tight to Bucky’s biceps and whimpering into their embrace. He sees himself forget, for a moment, that the Bucky he’s kissing isn’t the one that belongs to him, because Bucky’s lips are the same, and his taste is the same, and the way he kisses with his entire being is the same. Steve knows that from having gone seven decades without kissing him, and then getting it back. He sees forgiveness it in, maybe not as much as this Steve deserves but certainly some form of absolution, some portions of his lead-heavy soul made lighter by the physical reassurance that the man he loves is still alive. That this Steve, too, can get Bucky back. Can make up for not being able to catch him.  
  
A gasp resonates between them as the kiss breaks, more tears but also watery smiles, and Bucky’s flesh fingers curling around the side of past Steve’s neck.  
  
“We get to love him, right?” past Steve looks up, pleading in his eyes. Pleading for that bit of what Steve told him to also be true. “That’s what you said.”  
  
Steve nods, he kisses the side of Bucky’s head and then rests his cheek there. Bucky stays where he is, sandwiched between them, thumb stroking over past Steve’s damp cheek.  
  
“We live in a place called Wakanda. It’s beautiful, there. We have a home. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s ours,” Steve tells him, thinking, for maybe the very first time, of Bucky’s hut as _theirs_. “We have friends. People who love us. People who know we love each other, and love us anyway. We can dance with him in the moonlight and it doesn’t matter if someone might be watching.”  
  
Past Steve looks momentarily enchanted by the idea, and then promptly back to devastated. “Decades into the future. I have to wait decades to have that.”  
  
“No, you don’t.” Steve hesitates just for a moment, and then he takes his hands off Bucky’s hips and extends his arms forward, pulling his former self in closer so he can wrap his arms around both of them instead. Bucky kisses past Steve’s cheek, and leaves his mouth resting there. “If you go find your Bucky, if you save him, you won’t end up in the same place we did. You’ll have a different life. But you’ll be together. I know how much you love him. ‘Cause I’m you. How much you love him is how much I love him. There’s nothing on earth we wouldn’t do for this man.”  
  
“Nothing,” past Steve agrees readily, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Steve knows it is.  
  
“So go get him. And you can have whatever life you want.”  
  
“Somewhere quiet,” past Steve says immediately. He’s thought about this a lot; Steve knows he has. “Where there’s lots of sunshine. Someplace we could have a dog, and a garden.”  
  
“He’ll love that,” Bucky says. He’s still so close, his nose tucked against past Steve’s cheek. Above them, a flash of lightening illuminates the dull grey space, followed quickly by a loud clap of thunder. The storm is close. Surrounding them.  
  
Steve can’t quite imagine exactly how this feels for Bucky. He can’t quite imagine how he’d feel, either, if 29-year-old Bucky walked into this room right now, with tears on his face and a crater in his heart, and fell into Steve’s arms. He knows the way he’d hold him, the way he’d ache to make him smile again through the pain. The way he’d loved that boy, the way he’d thought Bucky hung the moon and all the stars just so Steve wouldn’t be afraid of the dark. The way he’d longed for him even when they were apart for mere hours. The way he’d yearned to kiss him, be held by him, fuck him and be fucked by him, sit with him on the fire escape and watch the stars come out one by one. It was an ache so deep Steve could never have washed it out even if he’d wanted to. A love so complete he drove himself into a frozen ocean rather than live without it.  
  
“I do love you,” Bucky whispers. “I’m not the Bucky you know, but … I was. I remember you, like this. Remember loving you so much I didn’t know what to do with it all.”  
  
“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve soothes. He doesn’t have to ask, whether Bucky’s feeling guilty about saying these things. He can hear it in Bucky’s voice. “It’s me. It’s us.”  
  
“He’s yours,” past Steve says, shaking his head. “I’m not …”  
  
“It’s okay,” Steve says again.  
  
“Steve?” Bucky asks. He lifts his head and cranes his neck around to look at Steve. Steve smiles at him, warm and genuine, and kisses him. _Are you sure_? and _yes, if you are_ passes through them in the kiss, no need for it to be spoken out loud. They’ve been able to do that for as long as Steve can remember, first with their body language, and then with just their eyes, and then with their tongues in each other’s mouths. When he pulls back, pecking a kiss to Bucky’s nose as he does, past Steve is watching them with his lips parted, in so close, eyes liquid again but this time in reverence.  
  
“I really get this?” he asks, on a daring exhale, as if the sight of them kissing right in front of his face was the most magical thing he’s ever seen. He looks to Steve. “We really get this?”  
  
“We do.” Steve smiles at him, too. “For you it’s gonna take a little longer to get there. But you’ll have it, for the rest of your life. He loves you back, y’know. The way you do, the way you’re always just a little bit scared that he doesn’t. You’re wrong about that. He loves you.”  
  
“You’re scared I don’t?” Bucky looks at past Steve, reaching both hands up now to hold his cheeks. He’s so gentle, and Steve remembers that. Remembers the way Bucky used to hold him like he was precious. Not all the time, Steve would have been pissed at Bucky always treating him like he was made of glass. But it wasn’t pity, he understands, it was worship.  
  
“He’s scared you’re too good for him,” Steve explains, and past Steve averts his gaze but nods.  
  
“I wasn’t anything,” he admits. “Too skinny, too loud. Too angry all the time. You were … golden. And now I’m tall and everybody pays attention to me but inside I’m still that kid. Still scared of the day you’ll realize you deserve better.”  
  
“There isn’t better.” Bucky pulls his face in, so past Steve’s forehead rests against his. Behind them, Steve buries his own face into Bucky’s neck. “And I wouldn’t want it even if there was. Never wanted anything but you. Fell in love with you the minute we met.”  
  
“Kiss him again,” Steve says, because he can’t stand this anymore, the words muffled against Bucky’s hair. He sniffs and struggles to hold back tears. “Please. He’s hurting so much right now, Buck.”  
  
He says _he’s hurting_ , because Steve never sat down to consider pronoun usage for if he was ever in a room with a past version of himself, but really it should be _I’m hurting_. It’s true, in both senses of it. With a soft, desperate noise, Bucky does as Steve asked, bringing their lips together rougher, angling past Steve’s head to deepen it. Steve keeps them both close, feels them moving against him, feels himself thickening in the pants of his suit from their noises and from Bucky’s backside rocking into him. Steve kisses too, attaching his lips to Bucky’s neck, sucking at the warm skin.  
  
When the kiss breaks another sob reverberates through the air between them, and in the smallest voice, Steve’s past self begs, “please don’t go. Like you did before. I don’t want to be alone anymore.”  
  
“I can’t stay forever, babydoll. I don’t belong here,” Bucky says sadly, and past Steve shudders at the nickname. Steve can feel it through Bucky, and he tightens his arms around the both of them. He hopes Bucky notices that, too, for further proof that Steve meant it a few weeks ago, when he said he’d always loved it, and that he’d been a coward in the past to feign annoyance at Bucky’s freely given affections.  
  
“Not forever. Just tonight. Please? In the morning I’ll do what he said, I’ll go find Peggy and I’ll tell her everything and we’ll start looking for you. Just stay tonight.” He gulps in a breath and drops his gaze down to the space between their bodies, shame burning off him, but Steve doesn’t think he should be feeling that at all. Steve is _proud_ of him. He knows what it takes for them to just ask for what they want like that.  
  
“He can stay,” he says, before Bucky answers. “If he wants to.”  
  
“You, too,” past Steve says, shaking his head to indicate he’s been misunderstood and meeting his eyes. “I like … seeing what I’m gonna become. You know all this Captain America stuff is just an act, you know I’m out here scared to death. You seem a lot braver.”  
  
“It’s still a bit of an act,” Steve says with a shrug, “but you do figure it out. How to be a leader, better than you are now.”  
  
“You got Bucky back.”  
  
“Yeah, I did. And you will, too.”  
  
“Is he still the most important thing in our lives?” Past Steve brings a hand up, knuckles accidentally dragging along Steve’s chest as his hand heads for Bucky’s hair, fingers tangling into it.  
  
“You bet he is. Always.”  
  
Bucky shivers between them. He can’t be cold, not with two overheated super-soldiers surrounding him like parentheses, so it’s not physical. Steve can feel old emotions rising to the surface again, he can feel the resurgence of the state Bucky had been in when he was first revived in Wakanda. When he was broken and wounded, when the horrible ghosts of all the things he’d done wouldn’t let him sleep at night, when he’d added everything up and come to the conclusion that he was beyond repair and would tarnish Steve, and Steve should run away from him and never look back.  
  
With any luck, the Bucky that belongs to this Steve will never go through most of that, so Steve doesn’t think it helps to mention any of it. Instead he kisses the back of Bucky’s head again, and suggests they lie down.  
  
There’s barely room in the cot for two of them, let alone three, so they unfold the sleeping bag and get an extra sheet and pillow from a trunk in the corner of the tent and they assemble a makeshift bed on the ground. Steve’s certainly slept in worse, they all have. He strips out of his suit and down to his underwear just because it’s warm, humid in the tent from the rain, and the other two follow his lead. Past Steve gasps when he sees the full extent of Bucky’s arm and all the scarring around it, and Bucky shakes his head gently and goes over to him.  
  
“It’s alright, I promise.” He takes past Steve’s hand and descends with him onto the sleeping bag, sitting with him close enough to let him explore with his fingers. “It doesn’t hurt anymore. Pretty useful, too.”  
  
Cross-legged next to him in his standard issue Army briefs, past Steve walks his fingers up the metal plates, face twisting into horrified expressions as he lightly touches the ridges of scar tissue that travel across Bucky’s chest. Steve gives them a moment. He figures they both need this, and finds himself very easily able to rationalize the fact that Bucky isn’t being touched by a stranger, just a different version of Steve himself. He supposes after aliens, there isn’t much anymore that he couldn’t make sense of. He watches the way his former self touches, with such reverence, and is warmed to his toes as Bucky smiles at him.  
  
Maybe they all needed this. Maybe there’s some sort of healing in it for all three of them. Bucky holds his hand out, indicating Steve join them, and he does. He wraps an arm around Bucky’s middle and tugs, pulls them so they tip over and end up on their sides, Bucky between them with Steve behind him again.  
  
“I do like it,” past Steve says, running his fingers through Bucky’s long hair again, “the hair. It’s so different. But I like it.”  
  
“I always loved how you looked, in all your different stages,” Bucky tells him. His hand slides up past Steve’s side and around to his back. “Loved you when you were 90 pounds soaking wet, loved you like this just as much. Gotta say though, you do look pretty sexy with a beard.”  
  
Steve hums behind him. His hand settles low on Bucky’s abdomen, pressing into him. “So do you.”  
  
“Seconded,” past Steve pipes up, and Bucky laughs.  
  
It lasts such a short time, before some new awful, overwhelming thought crosses past Steve’s mind and he deflates again, turning his face down into the pillow and sniffing.  
  
“Sweetheart,” Bucky whispers, cupping the back of past Steve’s neck and trying to lift his face.  
  
Steve understands so well. The Bucky lying between them is his Bucky, not the one that belongs to this broken, grieving kid. That kid wants _his_ Bucky back so badly he can barely breathe.  
  
“Everything will be okay,” Bucky tells him, moving forward to kiss past Steve’s forehead as Steve nods against the back of his head to reiterate that it’s alright. Bucky’s hand moves again, over past Steve’s hip, down his abdomen along the elastic top of the briefs, and then slipping easily into them. “Not tonight. Probably not for a little while after this. But it will. You’ll get him back.”  
  
“I miss him. You,” past Steve whispers.  
  
“I know.” Bucky’s fingers curl around his length, pulling it out of his underwear just enough to stroke it while past Steve trembles sweetly like a leaf in his oversized body.  
  
From behind them, Steve watches, enraptured. Bucky knows just how to work him, because of course he does, because it’s _Steve_. Bucky never truly forgot any of it, it was just filed away in a place he couldn’t readily access for a while. They never missed a step, when they fell back into each other, like no time had past at all. Steve slides his own hand down between Bucky’s legs, wrapping his fingers around the cock he finds warm and stiff, and stroking in time.  
  
There’s nothing elegant about any of it, it’s just a mess of hands and sloppy kisses and rutting into each other, three fractured souls chasing after carnal desires and physical release in the hopes that it might refill some of those cavernous places inside them, but it’s healing all the same. Past Steve loses it first, coming over Bucky’s fist with a cry muffled into Bucky’s mouth; noises Steve has heard a million times spilling from his own mouth but never quite like this before. Past Steve blushes once he stops twitching, pushing an embarrassed laugh back towards the pillow he buries his face in again just for a moment before he reaches out and helps Steve strip Bucky’s swollen cock until he’s grunting and spilling between them. Steve comes against Bucky’s back, not the best orgasm of his life but enough to sate him and leave him boneless and light-headed.  
  
When he can move again he throws an arm over both of them, using the tips of his fingers to urge his past self in a little closer to Bucky’s chest. Bucky wraps an arm around him too, and together they hold 28-year-old Steve, a man numerically but in all the ways that matter still just a scared kid, who’d wanted to fight because he wanted to help, who loved the freckled brunette he met at six years old more than the earth loves the sun, who will always be haunted by how close he’d been to grabbing that boy’s hand before he fell. This one, though, will rewrite their history and expediate their happily ever after. Steve is sure of it.  
  
Hours later, Steve wakes Bucky and they extract themselves carefully from a sweaty tangle of limbs. It’s a measure of how truly exhausted past Steve must have been, that he doesn’t even stir as they do. Steve and Bucky dress quietly, and slip back out to the dark, thick woods behind the camp.  
  
“Are you sure?” Bucky worries. “Won’t he be upset when he wakes up alone?”  
  
“Yes,” Steve answers heavily. “But it’ll still be easier, than having to say goodbye to you, not knowing when he’ll see you again. I’ve never known how to say goodbye to you.”  
  
“Do you think he’ll be alright? We didn’t make things worse, did we?”  
  
“He’ll be alright.” Steve reaches out for him, gathering Bucky into his arms and kissing him. Bucky holds onto him tight. “That kid is gonna tear the world to pieces, looking for you. And when he finds you, he’ll never let anything hurt you ever again.”  
  
“The Bucky from his time is gonna remember him.” Bucky noses through Steve’s beard, smiling as he adds, “no matter what Hydra’s done to him by this point. No matter how hard they tried to erase you. They never could. I never belonged to them.”  
  
Steve presses another kiss to his lips. “I love you.”  
  
“Me too. Let’s go home.”  
  
“Is it home?” Steve wants to know. He’s beginning to think of it that way, and hopes he’s not alone in that. “We could always go back to Brooklyn. If you wanted.”  
  
“Brooklyn doesn’t have any of the things that make a place home anymore. I’d miss our friends. Besides, it … it’s not really a location, you know? Home isn’t a dot on a map. It’s wherever you’re there with me.”  
  
“Well?” Shuri demands loudly, the microsecond they reappear on the platform.  
  
“Mission accomplished,” Steve tells her, with a grin. “You’re the best, Shuri.”  
  
“Ah, any time.” She waves her hand casually in front of her face, and then frowns, and corrects, “I do not mean that literally. I usually have more important things to be getting on with than caring about your love story, timeless as it may be.”  
  
“We know that.” Bucky hops down off the platform and kisses her cheek. She rolls her eyes and shoves him away.  
  
Later, after the sun has gone down, Steve takes Bucky’s hand inside their hut and leads him outside. Bucky’s back in his robes, blue and red Wakandan silk wrapped artfully around him. Steve is dressed similarly, although his robes are yellow. Bucky tilts his head inquisitively but follows Steve without a word, out into the warm night air, where the steady hum of crickets and bullfrogs are their soundtrack.  
  
“What are we doing?” he asks, as Steve keeps on holding his hand but wraps his other arm around Bucky’s waist.  
  
“I told past me that we can dance in the moonlight,” Steve says, swaying them, “and it’s been forever since we have. Figured we shouldn’t let him down.”  
  
“Right.” Bucky smiles at him. He slides his metal arm around Steve’s shoulders, the fingers tangling in the sweat-damp hair at the back of his neck. “Good thought. What do you think he’s doing right now?”  
  
“I think he was knocking down Peggy’s door first thing this morning.” Steve kisses the spot next to Bucky’s nose, and then gently shoves their foreheads together, resting as they sway. “I think she thought he was insane at first but he managed to convince her, because she knows he wouldn’t lie to her like that. Peggy was the reason I found you, at that factory in Austria, did I ever tell you that?”  
  
Bucky shakes his head.  
  
“I’d been given orders not to go after you. I decided, fuck that.”  
  
Bucky snickers. “Of course you did.”  
  
Steve shrugs. “At least I’m consistent.”  
  
“I guess that’s something.”  
  
“I grabbed my shield and a prop helmet from the USO show and I was setting out to go anyway.”  
  
“Were you gonna walk? To Austria?” Bucky asks, snorting again, repeating the very words Peggy had spoken incredulously to Steve as rain poured down on their heads.  
  
“That’s exactly what she asked,” Steve says, chuckling. “She talked Howard into flying us in, instead. If it weren’t for her, I might never have found you.”  
  
“I wish I’d had the chance to thank her.”  
  
“Oh!” Steve says, just remembering, “she told me to remind you that you owe her a Coke, when I went to visit her in the past.”  
  
“I’d completely forgotten about that. Feels like … a hundred lifetimes ago.”  
  
“What was the bet?”  
  
“You’d been knocked out.” Before letting him continue, Steve lets go of Bucky’s waist and twirls him with their hands over his head, smiling as he pulls Bucky back into the embrace. “I bet once you came to, you’d be demanding to go back out onto the battlefield the next day. She bet you’d want to go by that afternoon.”  
  
“How did _you_ lose a bet about how much of a moron I was?”  
  
“Wishful thinking,” Bucky returns. Unexpectedly he takes his metal arm off Steve’s shoulders and wraps it around his waist instead, dipping him low towards the ground. Steve loses his balance almost immediately and they tumble into the grass, knocking the wind out of each other a little and laughing about it as Bucky pulls Steve into his arms and Steve rests his head on Bucky’s shoulder.  
  
“I think,” Steve continues, answering Bucky’s original question, “right now, they’ve probably got all kinds of maps and reports and plans laid out on a table, and they’ve recruited Howard, and the rest of the Howling Commandos, too, and they’re hatching a plan to get you out.”  
  
“You think they’ll succeed?”  
  
“Have you met me?” Steve scoffs. “He won’t stop until he does.”  
  
Bucky is quiet, for a moment, and then in a hesitant voice, he asks, “what if I’m not worth all that?”  
  
Steve pushes up to rest on his elbow. He takes Bucky’s cheek in his other hand, and draws him into a long, slow kiss. “Stupid question. You are. I love you.”  
  
“I love you, too.”  
  
“To the end of the line, and all that.”  
  
Bucky shakes his head, squeezes a handful of Steve’s hair. “I shouldn’t have said it like that. There is no end, to the line. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me forever, Rogers.”  
  
Steve smiles into his lips. “Perfect.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Come talk to me [on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/) [or twitter](https://twitter.com/paper_storm_) if you want!


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